ART INSTITUTE'S NEW ACQUISITIONS AN AMERICAN CORNUCOPIA

Abigail FoerstnerCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The Limelight coffeehouse in New York's Greenwich Village was a mecca for beat generation writers, off-Broadway actors and photographers from around the world.

In an era when photography remained the orphan of the arts, Limelight owner Helen Gee collected it, exhibited it in the gallery she ran with the restaurant and nourished it with a strong brew of coffee and conversation that flowed until closing time at 1 a.m.

W. Eugene Smith and Lisette Model, Gee's photography teacher, held court there. The West Coast impresarios of the medium and Europeans such as Henri Cartier-Bresson stopped by when they were in town.

"American Photographers: Recent Acquisitions," opening Saturday at the Art Institute of Chicago, offers work by Smith, Model, Louis Faurer, Leon Levinstein, Robert Frank and Weegee, all who were part of the Limelight set.

The prints by Frank's contemporaries such as Faurer and Levinstein fill out an era in the museum collection and give a sense of context to Frank's images and ideas, so often considered as seminal but isolated works of their time.

Frank literally reinvented documentary photography with his darkly gritty visual poem, "The Americans," first published in France in 1958 and in America the following years. The Limelight was the place to meet and discuss photography in those years.

"Everyone in photography came to the Limelight. It was probably the busiest place in the village," says Gee. "Lisette Model came six nights a week, maybe seven. Frank wasn't a group person. He was part of it but apart. He wasn't sitting there every night." Gee is writing a book about the Limelight to be published by the University of New Mexico Press.

The Limelight, open from 1954-1961, and the Museum of Modern Art were the only places in New York City exhibiting photography in the 1950s. Thousands of people saw the well-reviewed Limelight shows devoted to giants such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Julia Margaret Cameron. The coffeehouse supported the gallery where the average print-even by the masters-sold for $25 to $75. But Gee gave shows as well to the up-and-coming photographers such as Frank, Faurer and Levinstein, whose street photographs often captured an edgy alienation in American life.

"We have other things by Faurer but this is as good as it will ever get," says Art Institute photography curator David Travis of a Faurer street photograph that creates a kinetic New York kaleidoscope. Relying on reflective surfaces and fractured urban vantagepoints, a shivering kid takes center stage in a circle of life that incorporates an accident scene and a church scene. Levinstein suggests the grim struggle of urban life in an anonymous street portrait taken on New York's Lower East Side. There are also photographs by Frank-including two from "The Americans"-in irreverent praise of fashion.

"Faurer shared a darkroom with Frank. There was this whole group of them. We're still learning about them. It's like discovering the FSA people," says Travis, referring to the corps of photographers who documented the ravages of the 1930s Depression for the Farm Security Administration.

The FSA's photographic branch later became part of the Office of War Information, and the Art Institute has acquired some of its file proofs. "One person rather lovingly made these proofs of all these pictures we got," Travis says.

While other museums have been collecting photographs by the dozens or even by the hundreds during the last two years, the Art Institute has been acquiring them by the thousands. Significantly, gifts from private collectors around the country accounted for more than 80 percent of the acquisitions, says Travis. Chicagoans David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg gave more than 722 prints, including most of those shown in the 1991 Art Institute exhibit of their collection. Emanuel and Edithann Gerard gave 97 Aaron Siskind photographs, a cross-section of which is featured in a separate Art Institute exhibit.

Chicagoans Lucia Woods Lindley and her husband, Daniel A. Lindley Jr., purchased for the museum a one-of-a-kind vintage set of street photographs by the recently rediscovered California photographer Rose Mandel.

"We were going by the 10s and 20s (of prints). We certainly never had a period quite so abundant," Travis says. "We acquired more than any other American museum I quizzed." Travis says a temporary change in the income tax laws that allowed more favorable deductions for gifts of art encouraged giving. But personal commitments to an institution play an ever important role. For instance, New York documentary photographer Walter Rosenblum gave two vintage prints by Paul Strand because he considers the Art Institute a museum with a social conscience in that it has devoted photography exhibits to issues such as homelessness.

The Art Institute photography collection now totals approximately 20,000 works.

The new acquisitions exhibit also includes work by Arthur Siegel, Alma Lavenson and Margaret Bourke-White. A Harry Callahan photograph of his wife, Eleanor, exemplifies his transformation of the personal into the poetic. An uncharacteristic Dorothea Lange photograph presents an impressionistic kitchen interior where a butter churn shrouded in a towel resembles a wayward spirit. Alfred Stieglitz explores in his photograph of poplars the essence of form in nature that parallels a similar exploration pursued in his photographs of New York City skyscrapers.

On the contemporary scene, the exhibit includes a wry Mark Klett saga of the West, this one with a desert landscape falling under the shade of a sign that reads "cutting trees prohibited." A picture is literally worth thousands of words in Robert Heinecken's mural-size portrait of Susan Sontag, a collage made from fragments of her book "On Photography" that Heinecken photographed. He printed the photographs in varying shades of gray and cut them up to create the small pieces he collaged. A nearly identical portrait is collaged from fragments of his photographs.

A portrait with a portion of the face photographed through a magnifying glass demonstrates Lerner's gift for turning the ordinary world into a compelling visual frontier of surrealism. Neimanas' mural-size photogram offers a hybrid portrait of Hulk Hogan and Marilyn Monroe. The unresolved fusion of the two heroes in the image speaks of all the disparate threads of pop culture and stereotypical role models.

PoKempner, a long-time patron of Chicago's blues clubs, has devoted at least as much attention to club patrons and personnel as performers in photographing the blues scene over the years. The exhibit includes one of these quintessentially Chicago photographs of the Checkerboard Lounge.

For the viewer, one of the strengths of an exhibit such as "American Photographers: Recent Acquisitions" is the chance to sample a variety of work from diverse periods by equally diverse artists. The exhibit pairs various photographs to point out visual and aesthetic comparisons between artists, comparisons that often reveal the distinct personal visions of artists in approaching similar themes.